101–110 of 343 posts
I'm keen to see Starlink deals with government censorship requests. Can a country even effectively enforce their requests? How will China enforce the Great Firewall for instance?
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There are already 1200 of them in orbit, can you go outside and point at a single one? When this controversy was started they addressed concerns by reducing the satellites reflectance and it seems to have worked.
A couple points: 1) 1200 is a small percentage of the tens of thousands of satellites that the full system, plus the other similar systems will eventually consist of. 2) Being able to go outside and point out a satellite has absolutely no relevance on the satellite's impact on professional astronomy. 3) It did not "seem to have worked". SpaceX experimented with reducing the reflectivity of their satellites, but only…
or... Or... OR... Launching massive powerful telescopes into space using SpaceX rockets for professional astronomers to use?
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SpaceX has put in a lot of effort to reduce the visual pollution aspect of starlink. See https://twitter.com/ralfvandebergh/status/136999054076322611... for how the visibility of Starlink sats has changed over time. For professional earth based astronomy, it is possible to remove the streaks digitally. But of course there is a slight impact. But what is the alternative? Just stop development of low earth orbit foreve…
Maybe SpaceX should make it up to the scientific community by promising to (at no charge) put 100T of satellite telescopes in a high orbit every year once Starship is functional.
But for low production rate things like telescopes, launch cost is almost negligible even at current launch prices.
A replacement for hubble could be launched with a single falcon 9. Building it would cost more than a billion.
The James Webb Telescope is at 10 billion USD and counting. Launch with very expensive Ariane 5 will cost maybe 200 million USD, so ~2%.
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I mean, they had to apply for a license to do it, and it was granted.
by whom? the FCC. i live in switzerland, does USA own LEO?
This whole fantasy of "rights" that people like to engage in is just that - a fantasy.
The best you can hope for is that the strongest is also a benevolent philosopher king.
So where is Amazon in relation to all of this? I got pinged by a recruiter from Kuiper the other week and all I can see is that there's no way they're on track to be working in 5 years. They don't even have a stable launch platform. Would Musk sell Bezos the ride?
Would there be potential AWS synergies that make any sense? Besides having the money to basically give it away for free, that could be a big value add if so. idk maybe enabling the blanketing of the earth in ever expanding ring/echo surveillance. or a cdn though uploading huge video files to a satellite hard drive might not make any sense or actually save any MS given the inherent satellite -> earth delay.
These satellites have marred the night sky. There is more to life than broadband availability.
I'm keen to see Starlink deals with government censorship requests. Can a country even effectively enforce their requests? How will China enforce the Great Firewall for instance?
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By pressuring Tesla. One thing making me nervous with Tesla's China business is that it will become too big for Tesla to let it fail, at which point Tesla (and every other Musk company) will be beholden to the CCP.
Concerns like this are why I think he considered taking it private again. He can personally not give a fuck and decide to pull out of China anytime, but being a public company and “acting in shareholder’s interests” might get in the way of ethics...
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It could have been a non-profit operation no? I would expect rural internet to be cheaper than what SpaceX is charging. $100 per month is very expensive, especially for people in rural areas which generally are poorer. Example, I believe over 90% of rural china has high speed internet and they pay less than $10 a month. Edit. Anyone have a good argument why we can't get $10 per month high speed internet in rural area…
The problem with laying fiber in the continental US (and I suspect also in Canada) is not typically cost. It's death by a thousand cuts with problems acquiring land rights, fighting incumbent ISPs and the local politicians and congressmen in their pockets, and simple will on the part of ISPs. Google tried to make fiber cheap and ubiquitous with Google Fiber and failed. If an organization with the power, resources, an…
They have the money to do it, they didn't want to spend it. They thought everyone would start writing letters to their congressmen on their behalf and force the government into making the other big fiber ISPs play fair.
That's how fucking dumb so the so-called "smartest people in the room" can be.
Google should have budgeted $10 billion a year for 10 years for Google Fiber. And in 20 years' time, Google could have been the largest provider of fiber Internet service in the United States, possibly servicing almost every single address in the country. Instead, they did what they *ALWAYS* fucking do... it didn't "catch on" in a year or two's time and they abandoned it.
I can't wait to see Google utterly fail as a company, given how shit they are at execution of everything but the most obvious, largest, and easiest-to-enter markets.
Elon Musk entered the three hardest markets known to fuckin' mankind... automotive, orbital launch, and ISPs, and he's utterly destroying mother fuckers. If I was an executive involved with Google Fiber, I'd blow my brains out due to utter shame.
If you're curious about both the positives and negatives of Starlink I highly recommend the mini documentary "Is this the END of Astronomy?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TifUa8ENQes
Most things in life are like this. Wind turbines are a great way to supply green energy, but building them takes a lot of energy. So it is important to also think about things like using low co2 concrete, and making them more efficient. They also kill many birds, but this is nothing compared to the amount of birds that cats kill. And engineers are working on ways to get fewer birds killed.